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ad, Kindly Light 




LEAD, KINDLY LIGHT 



Lead, Kindly Light, amid th' encircling gloom, 

Lead thou me on; 
The night is dark, and I am far from home, 

Lead thou me on. 
Keep thou my feet; I do not ask to see 
The distant scene: one step enough for me. 



I was not ever thus, nor prayed that thou 

Shouldst lead me on; 
I loved to choose and see my path; but now, 

Lead thou me on. 
I loved the garish day; and, spite of fears, 
Pride ruled my will; remember not past years. 



m 



So long thy power hath blest me, sure it still 

Will lead me on, 
O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till 

The night is gone; 
And with the morn those angel faces smile, 
Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile 
— John Henry Newman. 



Lead, Kindly Light 

An Exposition 



By 

Joseph Fort Newton 



THE. MURRAY PRL55 
Boston 



TK 5 ' ',1 



TO 

THOMAS HOUSTON MACBRIDL 



A FELLOW - FOLLOWER 

OF THE KINDLY 

LIGHT 



i 



DFC ^-71914 - 

\888727 

Copyright 1914 

by 

THE MURRAY PRESS 

Ac f» 



PRELUDE 

This is a little book of the faith that sings 

in the heart when life is new, before the evil 

days come when we shall say we have no 

pleasure in them. It makes plea, with every 

art at its command, for the keeping of that 

unbought grace of soul which is the charm of 

youth, and should be the trophy of age; 

pointing out, the while, that all high and true 

living leads to Christ, as of old all roads led 

to Rome. It holds that our life, to be of epic 

worth and beauty, must be lived in view of the 

eternal, and with a sense of wonder and awe, 

expecting that at 

"The next white corner of the road 
My eyes shall look on Him." 

To-day, even more than when Emerson 
wrote, "things are in the saddle and ride man- 
kind." Who can tell whither we are riding, 
to what purpose, and what melody men carry 
in their hearts "through dusty lane and wrang- 
ing mart?" A time like this is full of nameless 
hope, but full of peril also. Men are confused, 
troubled, and strangely alone. Anything is 
possible. Forms of faith are changing, and if 
many have grown indifferent, many others 
are waiting, as Einar said to Brand, till "the 
great new words be found." Sometimes, in 

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LEAD, KINDLY LIGHT 

rare moments, those greater words almost 
leap into speech, but not yet have our lips 
learned to fashion their music. Yet the signs 
bespeak the release of a spirit that shall soon 
find its way, even into the market place, and 
bring this hurrying age under the spell of a 
mighty and compelling faith. 

Meanwhile, as for man, his days are as 
grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. 
For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone. 
We, whose days are but a span, cannot wait 
until thinkers have found a way of blending 
the old Idealism, which was too static, with 
the new Pragmatism, which is too fluid to 
afford us any fixed point on which to rest our 
minds. Meanwhile, one thing we do know, 
yea, two things are certain — that God and the 

Soul exist: 

* 

"Ask thy lone soul what laws are plain to thee — 
Thee, and no other — stand or fall by them! 
That is the part for thee!" 

It matters little that we cannot write a 
Hamlet, or add a new star to the sky of 
thought, if only we can rule our own souls 
and shape them to a beauty more than tem- 
poral; that so we may bring to the Gate in 
the Mist something too noble to die. 

This at least is clear: he who goes in 
chase of The Blue Bird of happiness will not 
catch it. Happiness comes by the way or 
never at all. "Happy, my brother?" ex- 

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LEAD, KINDLY LIGHT 

claims Carlyle. "First of all, what difference 
is it whether thou art happy or not? To-day 
becomes yesterday so fast; all to-morrows 
become yesterdays; and then there is no 
question whatever of the happiness, but quite 
another question/ ' Nor has the fact of the 
matter ever been better stated than in these 
words, now to be read in an open marble 
book on top of a modest slab marking the 
grave of Meredith: 

"Life is but a little holding, 
Lent to do a mighty labor." 
We know now, from his Letters, what a 
sad life Meredith lived. Death, and things 
worse than death, pursued him. He did not 
win fame till fullness of years had made him 
indifferent to it, till he was alone and could 
not share it, till he was wise and did not need 
it. None the less, at eighty the birds were 
still singing in his heart, and he knew not 
"the set grey life and its apathetic end." 
That is success — to have kept the vision and 
the dream, and feel the stir of youth in the 
wrinkles of age; sweet of heart and full of 
hope; in the hand a sword for evil, in the 
soul a bit of a song — glad to live, but not 
afraid to die: 

"Into the breast that gives the rose, 
Shall I with shuddering fall?" 

Wise men know that money does not 
bring peace, that realized ambitions do not 

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LEAD, KINDLY LIGHT 

give content, and that success of the ordinary 
kind, if taken as an end in itself, is not worth 
striving for. To love the Truth, to seek the 
Ideal, to keep the wings by which we are 
lifted above the flats towards the hills whence 
cometh our strength, and, above all, to give 
ourselves to Him whose life is the light of 
men, and whose Way is "the road of the 
loving heart' ' — these are the things that mat- 
ter most. One of the lessons learned by living 
is that there is no peace of heart, and no 
enduring joy, until our wills are in key with 
the will of the Master of the world, "in whose 
great hand we stand." Foxes have holes, 
and birds of the air have nests; but man is 
homeless until he rests in the Eternal. 

At last, there seems' to fulfill itself for 
every man that adage of Goethe which, when 
we first come upon it, appears a mere para- 
dox: "Of that which a man desires in youth, 
of that he shall have in age as much as he 
will." Real success, then, would seem to lie, 
not so much in achieving what we aim at, as 
in aiming at what we ought to achieve, and 
striving for it, sure of reaching it, if not here, 
then hereafter. If only youth would take 
heed, and let its first care be for that good 
part which cannot be taken away, and which 
not even the rust of time can destroy, the 
eventide would be aglow with the light of a 
Morn beyond our mornings. 

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LEAD, KINDLY LIGHT 

Hence this little book, with its defense of 
the validity of the Moral Ideal, and its plea 
for a more eager aspiring for the more than 
we are and the better that we ought to be. 
The older one grows the more one judges his 
own life, and that of his fellows, by the note 
of bird-song in it. When a man thinks of our 
mortal lot — its light and shadow, its faith and 
doubt, its joy and woe — there comes over him 
a strange warming of the heart toward those 
who walk with him along the way; especially 
the young. And if he can bring to bear upon 
our common path some light of Faith, seme 
glint of the Ideal, and the hush of a great 
Hope, he has not lived in vain. 



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LLAD, KINDLY LIGHT 

No doubt it is useless to protest that 
Lead, Kindly Light, so beloved by all pilgrim 
souls, is not a song of the eventide. Time and 
usage have made it such, but that is to miss 
its meaning, if not to mar its music. Death 
is the one discipline of the soul that is absent 
from its lines. No, this is the hymn of a 
young man entering upon a half -century of 
activity and conflict, not the sigh of one 
around whom the twilights of age have begun 
to fall. A prayer for light when life is new, 
it closes with the hope that, after the grey 
waste of moor and fen, and the peril of crag 
and torrent, we may once more see the morn- 
ing faces smile. 

The history of the hymn is familiar, but 
it may be recalled. On December 2nd, 1832, 
John Henry Newman preached his sermon on 
Wilfulness at Oxford, and the next day he 
left with Hurrell Froude and his father for a 
cruise in the Mediterranean. They spent 
Easter in Rome, and the Froudes, returning 
to England, left Newman to pursue his jour- 
ney to Sicily alone. He reached Sicily, but 
was smitten with a fever, which came near 
costing him his life. On his way back — 
lonely, ill, and far from home — he was be- 

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LEAD, KINDLY LIGHT 

calmed for weeks in the Bay of Palermo, and 
spent his time writing verses. Among them 
was this hymn, dated "At Sea, June 16th, 
1833," and first published in February, 1834, 
entitled Faith. In the Lyra Apostolica it was 
headed, Unto the Godly There Ariseth a Light 
in Darkness; and in his book of verses, 1853, 
Grace of Congruity. Finally, in the edition of 
the same book for 1868 it was called, The 
Pillar of the Cloud. The lines, of which New- 
man made so little, were strangely prophetic 
of his career as a thinker; but did that pil- 
grim soul ever find rest on earth? 

When asked about the hymn, years later, 
Newman did not recall its closing couplet, 
and he was sure that its wide appeal was due 
rather to the haunting melody of the Dykes 
tune. He might have replied, as Tennyson did, 
by quoting the words of Goethe when he was 
asked the meaning of one of his early poems: 
"You probably know better than I do, being 
young." An old man could hardly know the 
pathos of this cry for Light as Newman felt 
it at the age of thirty-two. At that age, when 
the glow of youth has begun to fade, and be- 
fore he has learned to find his way in the Land 
of the Spirit, a man is strangely baffied and 
alone. For the moment life shows its nether 
side, one sees the dimness of the road, its 
difficulty, its dullness, its danger, and even 
the wisest knows that without a Guide he 

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LEAD, KINDLY LIGHT 

will lose his way and miss the goal. Hence 
this song of the Guided life, gathering up into 
a few flashing phrases long stretches of the 
human journey. 

I 

One who loves darkness rather than light, 
for whatever reason, cannot sing this hymn. 
Its beauty lies in its love of the light, and in 
its faith that the ray of white light falling 
from afar into our dark human world, is 
kindly. Howbeit, one detects in almost every 
line traces of those subtle rebellions, those 
secret chafings which we who love to choose 
our way feel against any kind of leadership, 
however gentle and wise. Much as we need 
guidance in this dimly lighted world, there is 
that in us which dreads it, lest it lead us 
where we fear to go. After many wanderings 
we learn that there is no sorrow so complete 
as that of having our own way, and he is wise 
who prays to be released from a pride of will 
which has in it so much pain. The day on 
which a man gives up his half dread and half 
desire and follows the light which is Light 
indeed, is ever a day of peace. Other peace 
there is none, as Dante learned long ago. 
And life will teach us, if we attend to it, that 
the Light is no less Kindly though it lead us 
over the wind-swept, grave-dotted moor. 

The "encircling gloom' ' is not the shadow 

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LEAD, KINDLY LIGHT 

of sorrow, or of fear, or even of death, but the 
inevitable gloom which attaches to all mortal 
life whatsoever — the gloom of a twilight world, 
which will not pass till the night of life is gone, 
which never lets us see well beyond a step, 
and which makes our guidance that of faith, 
not of sight. It comes early, and it stays late. 
Our thinking is done, not in sunlight and clear 
shining, but in "the infinite liberty of the 
shadow." There may come rifts in the cloud, 
but they soon close, leaving the greatest 
thinker to walk a dim path. Still, for every 
solitary pilgrim there is light enough, if he 
will follow it; not all light, not the perfect 
day, not even the dawn, but light enough to 
reach the far off home. Our prayer should 
be to be led amid the gloom, not out of it; 
for we cannot escape it until we pass "out of 
phantoms into realities/ ' which Newman made 
his motto. Once persuaded that the Light is 
Kindly, we may go forward with confidence, 
singing a song in the night. 

Since we live in a beshadowed world, 
where the next step is often hidden, it were 
idle to ask to see the distant scene. Of old 
the wise man said that "wisdom is before him 
that hath understanding; but the eyes of a 
fool are in the ends of the earth." The man 
who goes farthest, said Cromwell, is the man 
who does not know where he is going, and he 
alone knows the surprises of the way. To-day 

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LEAD, KINDLY LIGHT 

is the distant scene of former years, and it is 
neither grimly terrible nor wildly romantic. 
Having lived through a part of the future, we 
ought to know better than to mar it by futile 
forebodings or vain hopes. What we picture 
as a scene of crowned achievement, may turn 
out to be a scene of weakness and failure, or 
only a day like to-day. Ever the road lies at 
our feet, and the Light has no kindlier min- 
istry than when it leads us into taking, con- 
tentedly, one step more as long as we live. 

Little do we know of the longing of men 
to be able to say, "I was not ever thus." 
Just the fact that we are ever thus: ever 
stumbling over nearby duties in quest of some 
future mirage; wayward, wilful, with the sins 
of years ago still rampant — that is the trag- 
edy! Who does not hear the sigh of relief, 
of liberty, in the words, "But now, lead Thou 
me on." It is the joy of one who has dis- 
covered, almost suddenly, the sweetness of 
the guided life. Hence his appeal to the for- 
getfulness of God — "remember not past years" 
— a feeling that, while striving to plan his 
own life, he had missed the meaning of what 
life is. It is not so much the memory of 
flagrant deeds, as the pervasive thought of a 
wrong attitude, and of wasted years. Yet 
memory, while it may reproach us, is also a 
mirror in which we may see the footsteps of 
the Revealer. Even in his pride and wilful- 

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LEAD, KINDLY LIGHT 

ness he had been led, as Jacob awoke to 

realize that God had stood beside his stony 

bed, though he knew it not. Thus memory 

comes to the aid of faith: 

"So long Thy power hath blest me, sure it still 
Will lead me on." 

These lines should be read in the light of 
his sermon on Christ Manifested in Remem- 
brance, and a more exquisite sermon one could 
hardly imagine. Shadows fall, and we do not 
see their meaning; we see nothing. But after- 
wards, like Jacob — a favorite character with 
Newman — we kneel and pray where once we 
had slept. In the Watts painting of Love and 
Death there is only one ray of light falling on 
the scene; and that is on the back of Death, 
where Love can only see it when Death has 
passed. It is in the afterglow that we see 
why, whither, and by Whom we have been 
led. 

With this assurance, one may meet the 
dismal stretches of moor and fen, where the 
sky is as grey as a tired face, knowing that 
He who in other days led us in ways we knew 
not of, will lead us on. There is much to be 
learned on the moor, and withal a subdued 
beauty not seen elsewhere, as Hardy taught 
us in his study of Egdon Heath. But Hardy, 
like Emily Bronte, let the greyness of the 
moor get into his soul and subdue it. Not so 
Meredith, who kept a brave and sunny faith, 

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LEAD, KIN DLY LIGHT 

despite thick shadows, having "learned to 
live much in the spirit and see the brightness 
on the other side of life/' Ay, there is the 
secret, if we can find it, whereby a man may 
journey amid the "encircling gloom" and not 
lose his way. Whether in the "garish day," 
with its showy vanity and tinsel glitter, or 
in the places of peril where we must pick our 
path "o'er crag and torrent" — we have always 
the Kindly Light to lead us. 

"In the wilds of life astray, 

Held far from our delight, 
Following the cloud by day, 

And the fire by night, 
Carne we a desert way. 

Lord, with apples feed us, 
With flagons stay! 

By Thy still waters lead us!" 

II 

What is the Kindly Light by which we 
are led in the dim country of this world? 
For Newman, as we know from the poems 
and sermons of those pilgrim years, the beacon 
of life, of faith, of hope, was the light of the 
Moral Ideal. For him the moral sense was no 
uncertain human taper flickering in the gloom; 
it was the light of God in the soul of man. 
This it was that saved him from atheism, as 
he confessed; and this it was that men saw in 
him, and which, though not understanding, 
they followed. Of that Inward Ray, shining 
to guide us amid the dark confusions of time, 

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LEAD, KINDLY LIGHT 

few may ever hope to write as he has written. 
Here his insight was clear and true — height- 
ened, as was natural, by a genius for the 
Unseen to which the stars themselves were 
little more than phantom lights, visionary 
flashings of that mighty dream, woven be- 
tween God and the soul, which we agree to call 
the visible world. This is that light which 
lighteth every man that cometh into the 
world; the light of conscience — a light greater 
than all lights that may be lit by priest or 
philosopher, as the sun is greater than a candle. 
No fact about our sordid human nature 
is more eloquent than its instinct for the ideal, 
its sense "of a dim splendor ever on before," 
of a beauty ever about to be attained, of a 
victory ever about to be realized — that in- 
scrutable urge whereby 

"Upon our heels a fresh perfection treads, 
Born of us, yet fated to excel us." 

Often man seems to be little more than 
animal,, but when we see him leave his warm 
fireside and go through hardship, danger, and 
even death in behalf of a filmy, intangible 
ideal, we know that he is a citizen, by antici- 
pation at least, of another kingdom. The fact 
that he will give his life, if need be, for a mere 
wisp of dreams, shows that there is that in 
him which will not, cannot, die. Indeed, the 
quest after high ideals is at once the central 
reason for life and the best proof of immor- 

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LEAD, KINDLY LIGHT 

tality. This pursuit once abandoned, life 
need not run along any farther; the pitcher 
is broken at the fountain. He who has not 
this sense of the ideal, as truly as he that 
lacks charity, may be accounted as one dead. 
Why this quest, and what does it reveal? 
For one thing, our first proof of God is in the 
vision of His face as we see it in the light of 
the Moral Ideal: as "a victorious moral will, 
marching in the radiance of the ideal, is the 
final witness." Is that vision a reality or an 
illusion? Here is the root of the issue as be- 
tween atheist and theist — not in logic, not in 
fact, but in an inner attitude toward the ideal. 
Denial of God, when it is real, begins as a dis- 
trust or betrayal of the moral ideal in the 
soul, before it takes the form of a dogma. 
More often it is not a conscious mental proc- 
ess, but the fading of an inner light, or else a 
giving way to "those blind thoughts we know 
not nor can name," — when, indeed, it is not 
the shadow of sin hiding the stars. How 
critical, then, is that hour, whether it come 
in the early morning, or, as with Dante, 
"mid- way in this mortal life," when we begin 
to doubt or deny the ideal. For if the light 
that is in us be darkness, how great is that 
darkness! In the vision of God, new every 
morning and fresh every evening, lies our 
only hope amid "that shadow that keeps the 
key to all the creeds." 

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LEAD, KINDLY LIGHT 

Two attitudes toward the Ideal are open 
to us, between which every man must, and in 
fact does, make his choice for good or ill. 
There are those who divide humanity into 
two classes, the Sancho Panzas who have a 
sense of reality, but no ideals, and the Don 
Quixotes who have ideals, but no sense. By 
this expedient, we are told, facts may be 
recognized as facts and ideals as ideals — for- 
getting that the Ideal is the master fact of 
mortal life. In this view, held by many who 
do not confess it, our ideals, however lovely 
and alluring, are only the glamour cast over 
rude reality by a too fervid fancy; glimpses of 
an unreal beauty that falls on us from Fairy- 
land; the desire of a moth for the star. So 
far as they have any value it is that they lure 
us beyond truth, in order that we may arrive 
at truth. Following their delusive light, we 
enter a region where dwell all the glad, fair, 
bright things whereof we are wont to dream; 
but only for a brief time. At last we must 
come back to the bitter, old and haggard 
Actual, as, after years of dreams, it appears to 
the wise. So runneth the speech of those who 
would erase, as with a sponge, all the idealism 
of the race as visionary and vain. 

Over against this horror of great dark- 
ness rises the ancient faith of humanity, the 
secret alike of its heroism, its humility, and 
its hope. Older than the pyramids, newer 

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than the dawn, that faith is that God is 
somehow in our heavenly vision; our cloud 
of mystery, our pillar of fire; our never-failing 
light in the dark night of time. This faith, by 
which men live as seeing the invisible, is not a 
yielding but a power: the resolve, with the 
help of the Highest, to order the chaos of pas- 
sion by the light and authority of the Ideal: 
the heroic insight which sees life as it is capable 
of becoming, and commits its fortunes to the 
effort to make real what it thus sees. In the 
early morning of time, while it was yet dark, 
man chose this high faith, 

"And by the vision splendid, 
Is on his way attended," 

led by a dynasty of shining souls, from Ikhna- 
ton in Egypt to Plato in Greece, from Moses 
in the wilderness to Him of whom we read in 
"the Book of white samite' ' where the sweet 
Voice sounds and the Visions dwell. Heart 
and flesh fail; and the generations come and 
go, following the forlorn march of dust. Yet 
that vision grows evermore, and abides, 
bringing out the colors of human life, and 
investing our fleeting mortal years with en- 
during significance* and beauty. This is the 
eternal idealism in man: the Fact, as he sees 
it, behind the may a of material things; the 
Faith underlying all the religions of the world. 
Whence came this high faith and vision? 
Admit that the moral ideal dawned in the 

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LEAD, KINDLY LIGHT 

mind of man slowly, dimly, out of long racial 
and individual experience — a torch woven of 
fugitive rays of dream and desire, of hope 
and fear and shame. Have we then found 
the source of that light? Not yet. We have 
only traced the path along which man, led 
by a piercing ray, found a way out of the 
night of animalism into the dignity of the 
moral life. There remains the deeper question, 
the crux of the whole matter: did man at the 
beginning, and does he now, make his ideal? 
If so, whence the impulse to make it and 
where did he get his materials? From the 
world as externally observed? Why then is 
the conflict of that world with his ideals one 
of the oldest complaints and complexities of 
all thought? Did his ideal come from the 
soul itself standing in contrast to and defiance 
of the world? How then explain the awful 
disparity, so frequently confessed by the loft- 
iest souls, between himself and his ideals? 
If man made his ideal, it would seem that he 
could unmake it, or at least control it. Yet 
every man knows that, so far from controlling 
his ideal, he is ruled by it, and can have no 
peace until he follows its Kindly Light. 

No, man did not make his moral ideal, 
nor can he destroy it, though in hours of folly 
he would often gladly have done so. It was 
before we were; it is there whether we follow 
it or not; it will shine over our graves. As 

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LEAD, KINDLY LIGHT 

with the voices that whisper within us, telling 
us those truths beyond the reach of words, by 
which we live, so it is here. Not Plato, not 
Dante, but Truth surviving all the incarna- 
tions of genius has kept that celestial ray 
aglow; they have but celebrated that which 
was never mortal, and guided distracted eyes 
to a "light that never was on sea or land." 
One need not hold by Plato and his Idea or 
Essence, from which comes our thought, and 
word, Ideal. Let it be admitted that he was 
too abstract, seeking in the shadowy caves of 
memory for what is revealed in the process of 
living, in the stress of moral struggle, in the 
strain of moral victory or defeat. Neverthe- 
less, as respects the root of the matter, his 
bright and skyey insight was authentic, in 
that he found the key to life in the ideal, in — 

"those first affections, 
Those shadowy recollections, 
Which, be they what they may, 
Are yet the fountain-light of all our day, 
... the master light of all our seeing." 

Following the ideal is indeed a mighty 
adventure, asking for heroism, fidelity, purity, 
and, above all, courage — the root of every 
virtue. Nor Lancelot nor Sir Galahad ever 
went on quest more daring. Two things must 
be practiced with the utmost vigilance if we 
are not to lose heart, tire of the quest, and slip 
away, imperceptibly it may be, from the high 

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LEAD, KINDLY LIGHT 

demand. First, we must keep our minds open 
to the wonder and awe of the Ideal, which, if 
it be true to its name, points to the infinite, 
and is something greater than we have yet 
dreamed of. Second, we must renew our vows 
in the morning, and with the soul on its knees 
at eventide allow ourselves to be enlisted 
afresh in its pure service. Otherwise the 
vision will fade and grow dim, even in the act 
of applying it to the rough facts of life. In 
any event, there will be failures, subtle 
treacheries, sudden lapses, and bitter burnings 
of heart, but we must follow on. What if we 
fail at last, as fail we must if our ideal be high 
and true; what then? It has been nobly said : 

"When we are young, if we are of an aspiring na- 
ture, we are apt to make much of our ideals. Then that 
kingdom which embraces in itself all ideals, if not en- 
tirely unreal, is yet thought of as remote. As life goes 
on the ideals which are yet before us, even if attained, 
dwindle and that kingdom grows. We come to feel 
that it is indeed the substance; these the shadows. Yet 
it is our ideals that make real to us that Kingdom of the 
Ideal which is all around us now, whether we recognize 
it or not. To surrender ourselves to it with all our lives 
may do something toward its advancement, and that 
so we become fellow workers, however humble, with the 
wise and good who have gone before us, and with Him 
who made them what they were." 

Ah, here is meat for the mind , food for the 
soul, and help for the brave who struggle for 
the light that never fails! Amidst whatever 
doubts and defeats, let us have faith in that 

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LEAD, KINDLY LIGHT 

Kingdom of the Ideal which by our striving 
we may do somewhat to " bring near. The 
idealist in time, however baffled and dismayed, 
has the aid of the Idealist in eternity who can- 
not fail. What though he fall by the way- 
side, and his very name be forgotten, he 
knows that in the long last the victory will be 
with the right, as ever the victory has been. 
Nor has he lived in vain. The first harps are 
broken and lost; dead the hands that % struck 
them; but their art still lives and sings. Who 
were the first seekers after the Ideal? No one 
knows their names. Like us they were pil- 
grims, and had to pass into the Beyond; but 
they waked "those truths that perish never," 
and left a legacy of light! Across the years 
they hail us, citizens of that City which Plato 
saw, which Jesus bade us seek before all else, 
aiiH which remains our refuge and our hope. 
This is not romance; it is the calm geometry 
of life. 

But what if we fail through default, by 
treachery, by sin, and lose the glotv of the 
Kindly Light? He that is no longer young 
may count himself happy if the vanished ideals 
of youth are not succeeded by the cynicisms 
of satiety, or, worse, by the rank infidelity of 
broken vows and desecrated shrines. Few men 
remain quite true to the heavenly vision, and 
"come smiling from the great world's snare — 
uncaught!" Time makes the same subtle 

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LEAD, KINDLY LIGHT 

changes in our inner life of thought and char- 
acter, as in our outward aspect. Every five 
years we find ourselves another, and yet the 
same — there is a change of views, and not less 
of the light in which we regard them; a change 
of motives as well as of actions. As men come 
in contact with the harshness of life, by in- 
finitesimal yieldings, by minute cowardices, 
before they know it they have lost what is 
most worth keeping. Not many can bear the 
light of "the garish day." Slowly, amidst the 
greyness of the actual, the vision fades and 
the wonder is withdrawn. Often a man is 
unaware of his loss, thinking that he has at- 
tained to wisdom, when in fact something fine 
has gone out of his life, leaving him wingless 
and alien to the sky. This is the great tragedy 
— that youth rules the world only when it is 
no longer young, and its ideals are damaged 
and dim. If our life-history be another story 
of The Light that Failed, what then? And this 
brings us to the last, haunting lines of the 
hymn of the Kindly Light. 

Ill 
Who were those Angel Faces who looked 
so kindly in the morning light, and whose smile 
the singer prayed to see once more? They 
were not his lost loved ones whom death had 
transfigured into angel shapes, as in the story 
the verses of the little girl were called poems 
after she had passed away. That was not 

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LEAD, KINDLY LIGHT 

what Newman had in mind, though he would 
be the last to deny us such tender use of his 
words. It was not the dear, pitiful, august 
dead, much as we long to see them touched 
with immortal radiance, but the Guardian 
Angels of the soul, who "do always behold the 
face of my Father in heaven/ ' of whom he 
sang. From earliest years he had believed 
that we come into the world not unattended; 
but in the keeping of a Guiding Spirit, whose 
face we see when we are young. Shadows fall 
and the face fades, but we may hear the sound 
of footsteps by our side in the loneliest paths of 
life. What he laments is not only the loss of 
those angel faces, but the loss, through wilful 
pride and planning, of their approving smile. 
Of this reading there is no doubt at all for 
the student of the life of Newman. When he 
wrote these lines his friends were still around 
him in almost unbroken circle. Even Hurrell 
Froude, albeit smitten and doomed, was still 
alive. By "angel faces" he meant the faces of 
his guardian angels — a thought much with 
him at this time, as witness his poems, Angelic 
Guidance and The Scars of Sin, both written in 
1832; and it remained with him to the end. 
Such was the interpretation of the hymn in the 
Hursley vicarage where Keble lived, and where 
Newman was so often a guest. It is made sure 
by a reading of The Dream ofGerontius, written 
in 1865, when, upon hearing of the death of a 

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LEAD, KINDLY LIGHT 

friend, he followed in imagination the path of 
his friend into the unseen, and cast his musings 
into a poem which was at once an allegory and 
an act of faith. 

So far Newman. What are the angel faces 
which we have loved long since and lost awhile? 
Let each one look deep into his own heart 
before he answers the question, watching the 
while, as Emerson bade us do, "that gleam of 
light which flashes across the mind from with- 
in, more than the luster of bards and sages." 
When we seek some high and pure ideal, 
following it through a multitude of plans for 
long years, over many obstacles, despite fail- 
ures, are we seeking the ideal or is it seeking 
us? We push aside every substitute for it, 
seeking it in the books we read, in the friend- 
ships we form, in the labors we undergo, in the 
sorrows we endure — pressing through the 
crowd of things to touch the hem of its robe. 
Is it a call or an urge? An allurement, or an 
inward compulsion? Or is it both? What is it 
that thus impels us, while seeming only to 
invite us to be like itself? 

If a man will look closely at his highest 
ideal, his holiest dream— that which he cannot 
help worshiping — he will find nothing to which 
it is more like than to Him who is "the lamp 
of poor souls" and the Light of the World. 
There is what Goodwin used to call "an in- 
stinct for Christ," in whom the moral ideal 

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LEAD, KINDLY LIGHT 

takes a form full of grace and truth, touched 
with all the hues of human life, and in follow- 
ing whom the quest for personal worth be- 
comes a personal fellowship. Once we know 
what it is astir within us, Who it is we are 
seeking, and by Whom we are so divinely 
drawn while blindly groping, the way is plain. 
How soon, alas, even the brightest ideals of 
early life fade, tarnished by the dust of years; 
but He, as was his way of old, renews the 
Heaven that "lies about us in our infancy/ ' 
and our fairest dreams return. Even the 
hardest of us become, at His touch, as little 
children — "those little birds," as Dostoevsky 
loved to call them — and the morning faces 
smile. Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven; 
and with this renewal of our faded visions, this 
giving back of those long lost ideals, of which 
we hardly dare think, every other recovery 
seems possible and sure. 

"Sins may, be forgiven and visions may be given 
back. ... It is in the things that come back that life 
takes on its finest glow and power. The purpose that is 
given back to us comes as a stronger purpose than the 
one with which we began, and by its return we learn 
how different a divine purpose is from the wavering 
and uncertain purpose which is made up wholly out of 
our own minds and wills. As graciously as the light is 
called kindly, this second advent of our highest hopes 
and ideals comes not mainly with condemnation for 
lost years, but as something which welcomes us back. 
. . . Full as it is of beauty and of thought, what makes 
the glory of the hymn, after all, is its quiet assumption 

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LEAD, KINDLY LIGHT 

that at tlie end of discipline the soul shall have restored 
to it what it has lost." 

What a Gospel for a world where so much 
fades into the Shadow, and where life is "a 
count of losses every year!" It is needed on 
this earth, if only to keep alive the souls of us, 
and to renew our faith in those dreams of 
beauty and of truth which we never quite 
forget, and never wholly remember save under 
its spell. It takes us down from our towering 
pride, and teaches us humility and sweet 
charity. Yea, it brings us back, after years of 
vanity and disloyalty, to a simplicity of faith 
in the things that grow not old, free from the 
shadow of Night and the fear of the Morrow — 
even such fear as fell upon the Bunyan pilgrim 
at the Dark River, lest he be drowned forever, 
and so never see the Face that he had come 
of many miles to see. And it gives such as 
have lost the heart of a little child hope that it 
will come back to them at last, sometime, 
somewhere — if not here, then out yonder with 
the dwellers of the City on the Hill. 

What dreams were ours when life was new, 
what radiant idealism lighted up the future! 
We dreamed, and fancied ourselves immortal. 
We dreamed, and the old worn human way 
seemed a path of light shining more and more 
unto the Perfect Day. We dreamed, and the 
rosy gates of love, honor and power opened at 
our touch, and we entered with happy step. 

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LEAD, KINDLY LIGHT 

We dreamed and dreamed and dreamed, and 
how often our dreams have come true only to 
confuse and baffle the awakening. And yet, 
except that too much dreaming may preclude 
the realities of to-morrow, where would the 
world be? What if our ideals change with the 
years, they are not illusions, much less de- 
lusions. It is the Ideal, though it never be 
reached, that lifts us from the dust and leads 
us to the skies. 

"Is it a dream? 
Nay but the lack of it the dream, 
And failing it life's lore and wealth a dream, 
And all the world a dream." 

There will "come a time, when it shall be light; 
and when a man shall awaken from his lofty 
dreams, and find his dreams still there, and 
that nothing has gone but his sleep!" 

Thus evermore, now in forms lovely and 
gentle, now in shapes shrouded in awe, the 
mighty Ideal journeys before us. Fellow 
servitors of the Dream, let us follow the gleam 
to its source — the Light itself! When, at last, 
we shall look upon its glory we shall never 
again be afraid, nor regret aught we may have 
renounced to be true to our vision. For this 
dream of the Ideal is the light of God within 
us! Without it we perish! And He who made 
us what we are is in the grand pursuit — in the 
faith that makes it possible, in the struggle 

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LEAD, KINDLY LIGHT 



that makes it noble, and still more in the 
Kindly Light that guides it. 

"Not of the sunlight, 
Not of the moonlight, 
Not of the starlight! 
young mariner, 
Down to the haven, 
Call your companions, 
Launch your vessel, 
And crowd your canvas, 
And, ere it vanishes 
Over the margin, 
After it, follow it, 
Follow the Gleam!" 



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